The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America

by Dorothy Sue Cobble

American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state. This socially and ethnically diverse movement for change emerged first from union halls and factory floors and spread to the "pink collar" domain of telephone operators, secretaries, and airline hostesses. From the 1930s to the 1980s, these women pursued answers to problems that are increasingly pressing how to balance work and family and how to address the growing economic inequalities that confront us. The Other Women's Movement traces their impact from the 1940s into the feminist movement of the present.


The labor reformers whose stories are told in The Other Women's Movement wanted equality and "special benefits," and they did not see the two as incompatible. They argued that gender differences must be accommodated and that "equality" could not always be achieved by applying an identical standard of treatment to men and women. The reform agenda they championed--an end to unfair sex discrimination, just compensation for their waged labor, and the right to care for their families and communities--launched a revolution in employment practices that carries on today.


Unique in its range and perspective, this is the first book to link the continuous tradition of social feminism to the leadership of labor women within that movement.

Genres: Feminism, History, Labor, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, Political Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2003

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

highwayscribery wanted to tell you about “The Other Women’s Movement,” by a Rutgers University professor named Dorothy Sue Cobble.

The reason for reading this academic thesis was a little primary research for a screenplay dramatizing the 1964 Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union drive to organize bunnies at the Detroit Playboy Club.

The force behind this effort was a left-over from 1930s union activism, one Myra Wolfgang, “the battling belle of Detroit.” A rebel woman who had helped organize the Woolworths lunch counters during the Great Depression.

Years later, she was something of a national figure to the extent women were paid attention to at all and held a position as a national vice president of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.

She was old school. Betty Friedan called her an “Aunt Tom,” for what she considered Wolfgang's subservience to union bosses. Wolfgang responded that Friedan was the Chamber of Commerce’s Aunt Tom.

Anyway, Wolfgang sent her 17-year old daughter into the Playboy Club as a union “salt”- an insider - and began the successful drive.

She said Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” perpetuated the notion that women should be, “Obscene and Not Heard.”

That’s the scribe’s title. Go ahead and try to steal it, he can use the publicity.

Anyway, Cobble knows a lot about Myra Wolfgang, waitress unions, and the Playboy campaign in particular so the scribe went out and ordered her book from Princeton University Press.

It was the wrong book. The one (hopefully) with all the Playboy stuff is in “Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the 20th Century.”

But this book was interesting and will serve to deepen the scribe's indoctrination prior to scribbling that story.

“The Other Women’s Movement,” is what Cobble believes to have been a forgotten generation largely excluded from the story of feminism as currently redacted.

That story, and the scribe admits to not having known this, involved a “first wave” of feminists in the suffragettes’ era (early 1900s) and a “second wave” of the 1960s spawned and led by the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems of the world.

Cobble’s thesis is that in between these two waves was a crucial period peopled with a special breed of “labor feminists” who took root and then cover in their unions during what was the heyday of organized syndicates in the United States. They took the form of activists in large feminine “auxiliaries” to the unions, and later as members and leaders themselves.

The labor feminists tackled, early, the questions women are still dealing with today; the need to make employers understand that “time” itself is the most valuable commodity to a woman with family; and that less work, rather than more money, is preferable to them.

This book reviews the debate between working class women in unions and those in a more conservative outfit called the National Women’s Party, which first (and the scribe did not know this either) floated the idea of that Equal Rights Amendment feminists pushed until the mid-‘80s.

Later, all feminists were behind ERA, but in the beginning, the factory girls and servers felt it was a Republican ruse for allowing employers to circumvent the real issues of industrial democracy, wages, and job security they fought for in statehouses and at the collective bargaining table.

Cobble successfully renders the exciting rebel-girl beginnings of, Wolfgang, Anne Draper, Ruth Young, Esther Peterson, Gladys Dickason, and a long cast of worthwhile characters you’ve never heard of, and follows the threads of each’s long career dedicated to the same issues that fired their youths.

Labor feminists were split amongst themselves and others in the women's movement over whether special labor laws protecting women in particular (capping hours, preventing dismissal for pregnancy) actually kept women apart, or separate, and thus more vulnerable to being judged as “less” than men.

Others wanted no special protections, just the same rights everybody else had. These latter eventually won out, but only with the slow passing of the labor feminists and their influence on women in America

So that is what was interesting about the thesis; the airing out of bread and butter issues afoot in the land or at least among the womanry. It shows the cracks and coalescence and the interests that separated women by class and race when it came to defining exactly the kind of “progress” women should aspire to.

It reminds us that these debates are going on today and provides a primer on the roots of those debates.

More than anything, and as was to be expected, the labor feminists were concerned with the workplace and Cobble argues that such should be the focus today, work having the feature role it does in most our lives.

The sixties wave of feminism offered some correctives to the labor feminist doctrine, Cobble says, but also accepted, rather quietly, some if its most important analyses of work, class and their relation to women’s position in society, beyond gender itself.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of Cobble's reason for writing this book is to add to existing efforts to “rewave feminism” - to show that it wasn't simply dormant between the first and second waves. In doing so, she places heavy emphasis on the role that class played in women's lives and “their views of what reforms were desirable and possible” (1). From the 1940s to the 1960s, Cobble argues that “labor feminists,” who built off the ideas of earlier social feminists like Florence Kelley, Rose Schneiderman, and Jane Addams, were at the forefront of women's reform efforts just as much as individualistic feminists, such as those in the National Women's Party, who failed to recognize class power dynamics.
Labor feminists, rather than “being oddities, were, at times, the dominant wing of feminism” (3). Their goals in the post-WWII period “revolved around the achievement of what they referred to as 'full industrial citizenship.' That meant gaining the right to market work for all women; it also meant securing social rights, or the social supports necessary for a life apart from wage work, including the right to care for one's family. They looked to the state as well as to unions to help them transform the structures and norms of wage work and curb the inequalities of a discriminatory labor market” (4). Though they never attained top leadership positions in either government nor unions, they did gain a foothold in both and expanded their leadership roles and their voice in each. The Women's Bureau was an important place of reform in government, and within the unions, several played larger roles than others, such as the UAW, UWPA, ACWA, IUE, ILGWU, UE, FTA, and AFA.
Labor feminists' reform agenda included “an end to unfair sex discrimination, equal pay for comparable work, a family or living wage for women and men, the revaluing of the skills in 'women's jobs,' economic security and shorter hours, social supports from the states and from employers for child-bearing and child-rearing” (5-6). They fought against the Equal Rights Amendment, because “unlike the NWP feminists, labor feminists and their allies did not think that all differential treatment based on gender was unfair or discriminatory” and that because of this, “an amendment that threatened to remove all such legislation without any guarantee of comparable replacement protections risked harming women” (64-65). Rather, they wanted to review laws on a case-by-case basis. Thus, they supported the Women's Status Bill instead, which would have created a presidential commission on the status of women to “eliminate unfair discrimination based on sex” (64). Neither the ERA nor the WSB would be passed, but after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that state protective laws conflicted with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, labor feminists had little reason to oppose the ERA. Both labor feminists and the more individualistic feminists supported the Equal Pay Act - first proposed in 1945 but not passed until 1963 - though labor feminists wanted “equal pay for comparable work” rather than “equal pay for equal work” so that it could affect a broader range of work. Through all of this was a recognition that “equal treatment was insufficient to bring equality. [...] [Labor feminists] understood that equality was a relationship of difference, and that achieving rights equal to men was a place to begin, not end” (223).
In the epilogue, shes argues that the women's movement (“like the labor movement”) needs a “more class-conscious approach, one that acknowledges class as a still-salient, lived experience that shapes the needs and perspectives of all women. For left unaddressed, a class reproduces itself in social relations and in social policy. And without such a class-conscious approach, the problems of one group of women end up being solved at the expense of another” (227).

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cobble’s book tells the story of “the missing wave” of working-class women’s activism from the late 1930’s to the 1980’s. She calls these activists “labor feminists.” They were feminists in that they saw that women were disadvantaged in the workplace because of their sex and tried to rectify those injustices. They were labor feminists in that their version of feminism focused on the needs of mostly lower-class working women. Like many recent gender historians, Cobble makes a strong case that the wave approach to feminism overlooks groups like the labor feminists, whose activity between and during the major waves deeply shaped women’s lives, labor issues, and politics.
Cobble’s labor feminists emerged at the end of World War II. For many working-class women, working during the war raised their expectations at work and encouraged their desire for reform. Women were also becoming a much larger percentage of the workforce. After the war, many of them increased their activism in making workplaces safe, fair, and hospitable for women. The goals of these labor feminists fit into two categories. First, they wanted fair treatment in the workplace. This meant ending inequitable sex discrimination or sexist treatment, equal pay for similar work, a living wage for both sexes, raising the prestige and pay of female-majority jobs, job security, and shorter hours. Second, they wanted “social rights,” or state and employer supports that would enable them to be both breadwinners and family caregivers (4).
Labor feminists joined unions and formed independent women’s unions to pressure their employers and the state. They were also advocates for racial progress who helped unionize and gain better conditions for trades that minorities dominated, such as domestic and kitchen workers. As a whole, they won many victories in this period, including increased presence in unions, the unionization of jobs like stewardesses and domestic caregivers, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Cobble notes that many of these state interventions in the workplace helped expand the benefits of the New Deal to new populations such as women and minorities who had been overlooked in the original deal.
Cobble contends that labor feminists formed their own version of feminism that both inspired and conflicted with second wave. She notes that second wave feminism’s concerns with issues like gender equality and breaking down gender roles did not reflect the actions or the priorities of all politically active women in this time. Labor feminism, for instance, rarely challenged the gender division of labor within the home. While their viewpoints were both feminist, these parties often clashed over how best to put feminism into practice politically and socially.
Cobble’s best illustration of this conflict lies in the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Second wave feminists supported the ERA because it aimed to bring about equality of rights under the law between the sexes and to outlaw sex-based discrimination. Labor feminists believed this focus on more ideological notions of equality overlooked the lower class working woman’s need for special protections. Labor feminism maintained that women needed hourly maximums that would enable them to take care of children, maternal leave, bars against termination for getting married or becoming pregnant, and safeguards against harassment. These rights were particularly important for the huge numbers of single women in the workforce whom labor feminisim was keen to protect.
The source of discord here was that labor feminists wanted to enhance women’s ability to function as workers and mothers by accommodating the workplace to women’s needs. They therefore feared that the ERA would ban this benevolent discrimination. In contrast, second wave feminist groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) supported the ERA because they wanted to do away with the dominant conception of gender that called for women to work and bear the most responsibility for childcare. Cobble’s portrayal of this debate shows two vibrant yet competing versions of feminism, each shaped largely by the class perspectives and interests of their constituents. Despite their disagreements over policy, Cobble contends that labor feminism was a key precedent for second wave feminism because it pushed aggressively for equality under the law and challenged many gender roles in the workplace.
Cobble makes a key contribution to the historiographies of women and feminism in the US. She argues that one of the wave approach’s many flaws is that it overlooks class differences. Works like Sara Evans’ Tidal Wave and Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open emphasize the revolutionary impact of the second wave, portraying the 1960’s as a sudden and massive awakening of feminist activism. The shortcoming of the wave perspective is that it overlooks what lower-class labor feminists were doing to better women’s lives and put forth their own version of feminism before the second wave. The wave approach to women’s history may provide some useful simplicity, but Cobble shows that it drastically oversimplifies 20th century women’s history
Cobble’s book is concise, clearly written, and rich in detail. The book may be too specific for undergraduate reading, but historians would do well to incorporate her criticism of the wave historiography of feminism into their teaching and writing. My own field, foreign policy, can handle around a dozen different paradigms and variations of policy in the 20th century alone. Surely women’s history need not confine itself to three movements in the 20th century. Cobble has done her the field of American history a service in pushing us in that direction.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and useful book that focuses on the midcentury history of "labor feminism" between the classic first and second waves of feminism, arguing that these decades of important political work by union women has been largely forgotten because their politics did not make sense within the traditional dichotomy of egalitarian feminism vs difference feminism, and because they fought for power in the workplace in quite different terms than second wave feminists generally did a generation later. Important for anyone interested in women's or labor history, as well as the history of the New Deal

[Jaime Rispoli-Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Women's Movement, by Dorothy Sue Cobble covers the American women's labor movement, from the 1930's to the late 1980s.Cobble argues that social feminists looked to a variety of causes and solutions to fix "women's secondary status".There were many “competing visions” for achieving equality, which is central to Cobble’s argument that feminism was not one size fits all. She argues that women "wanted equality and special treatment" and did not see them as mutually exclusive. Many women reformers believed in the differences between men and women, and that equality couldn't be found in being treated identically. Cobble also argues that women today need to recognize that the labor feminist struggle is not over, and need to create a new class politics, the "next women's movement,” in order to achieve reform.

In many labor reform narratives women are marginalized, and women labor feminists are treated as 'exceptional" examples of activists, rather than as part of a "pattern of working class women's activism. Cobble’s arguments place the nonvoting women at the center of political influence, rather than as a "special interest" group, a central role of "critical turning points," including lobbying state and federal government, as well as backing the Democratic left and childcare policies. Labor history scholarship often makes assumptions regarding women in the labor movement, that they did not have the numbers, or leverage needed to make changes, and Cobble states that these old assumptions are "undermine[d]" by her arguments. Cobble states that her book "converges with the work of historians who see the labor movement as a vehicle for social reform.” She places her arguments in the larger historiographical discourse as a “continuation of progressive class based politics…," what she calls a "revisionist wave" of the labor record. Cobble doesn't offer an in 10 depth look at how men unionists reacted to the women's demands, but she does make the point that women labor reformers were complex in ideology as well as in action, and they were critical to second wave feminism.

[Lashonda Slaughter Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cobble's book gives you a pretty detailed account of the women's movement through the lens of labor and unions. She also delves into what issues were most important for working class women from the 1930s-1960s, proving that despite some popular opinion otherwise... the women's movement wasn't stagnant during the period. Some of the efforts to gain comparable conditions in the work place for working class women are important to note... like not firing a woman because she dare to get pregnant or firing a flight attendant because she is over 32....lol.
The only problem I found with the text is that Cobble often gets caught in the detail because she tends to drop name after name after name sometimes without any context and in between the names...the dozens and dozens of unions these women were affiliated with leaving a chaotic mess of words that has the reader searching for what exactly is the point of the segment of the text...

beyond that technical issue...the book delves into a topic that seems to be pretty relevant.

[Chris Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is chock full of interesting information about labor women from the 1930s through the 1980s, who worked in parallel but sometimes at cross purposes with 2nd Wave Feminism. The author points out that feminism did not come so much in waves as that it was a constant evolution, but there were very significant differences in feminism due to the class divide that existed, most especially between the working class the the middle class. This was a woman's movement I did not know existed until this week, and I'm still amazed at all they accomplished during these 5+ decades.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bah. Labor History. My eyes glaze over when I read about trade unions. This book, however, is well-written, well-researched (and I will confess)engaging.

[Katie Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've read for grad school so far, I think. Fantastic stuff.

[Vanessa Knox]

It open my eyes to what's really going on in America's workplace. What was true back then is happening today, so knowledge is power.